The Art of Manliness - Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.400 On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy.

00:00:17.920 Today, just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their

00:00:21.880 late 90s.

00:00:23.020 As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion

00:00:26.600 across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has

00:00:31.200 captured and compiled them in a new book, When the Sea Came Alive, An Oral History of D-Day.

00:00:36.500 Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today Garrett

00:00:41.180 takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history, and helps

00:00:45.360 unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then, and has

00:00:50.080 become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time.

00:00:52.540 We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you

00:00:57.120 may never have heard before, a couple of the myths around D-Day, and the sacrificial heroism

00:01:01.600 born in this event that continues to live on.

00:01:04.240 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash normandy.

00:01:18.040 Garrett Graff, welcome to the show.

00:01:20.180 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:21.320 So it is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, where the Allied forces

00:01:27.720 crossed the English Channel and started a Western Front in World War II in Europe.

00:01:33.880 And you got a new book out about that day.

00:01:36.920 It's called When the Sea Came Alive, An Oral History of D-Day.

00:01:40.620 And this book is amazing.

00:01:42.580 What I love about it is you create this narrative of what happened that day, not only that day,

00:01:47.580 but leading up to D-Day, and all you use is quotes.

00:01:52.600 That's it.

00:01:53.180 Just quotes from people who had firsthand experience with the invasion.

00:01:57.820 What was the impetus behind creating this oral history of D-Day?

00:02:01.360 Yeah.

00:02:01.540 So in 2019, I wrote a oral history of 9-11.

00:02:07.260 It was called The Only Plane in the Sky.

00:02:09.360 And 9-11 is, I think, arguably, or not arguably, the most famous and consequential day of the 21st century.

00:02:19.520 And in 2019, it was this very specific moment, which was, it was 18 years after 9-11, and you began to see that day shift from memory into history.

00:02:35.480 The first American servicemen and women were coming out of basic training and deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, who were born after 9-11.

00:02:45.920 You know, the first firefighters were coming into FDNY, who were born after 9-11.

00:02:53.940 Now, as we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day, it's sort of the other bookend of that shift, that this was a huge, titanic, monumental day, or arguably the most famous and consequential day of the 20th century.

00:03:12.260 There were a million combatants that day in motion across Europe.

00:03:17.640 And 80 years on, that number has dwindled to perhaps a few thousand.

00:03:24.960 And we are seeing this day shift entirely from memory into history.

00:03:32.020 And so, what I wanted to do with this book was to take this moment when we have effectively every first-person story that we will ever have of D-Day, of what that day was like, of what the people who participated in that day experienced and lived,

00:03:51.420 and to try to tell really the most comprehensive version of that day that I could in the first person.

00:04:01.320 There's a unique power, I think, that comes with oral history where, you know, I think, and I've written plenty of narrative history as well,

00:04:10.980 but I think often in narrative history and when you're writing about an event like 9-11 or like D-Day, you write about it historically in a more organized and logical and neater way than anyone that day actually lived or experienced.

00:04:30.140 And oral history helps, I think, put you back in that moment knowing only what the participants knew at that time.

00:04:43.020 And so, you know, you have these letters and these quotes and these reflections from people aboard the ships crossing the Channel on the night of June 5th.

00:04:52.360 They don't know that they're about to have this incredible, heroic, courageous day ahead of them.

00:04:58.280 They, in fact, feel quite the opposite, which is they don't feel particularly heroic or courageous about that which they are about to embark upon.

00:05:06.860 Because for them, it's unknown and it's terrifying.

00:05:10.980 What was the process of putting this book together?

00:05:13.540 Because it is 500 pages long.

00:05:15.820 And as I said, there's very little.

00:05:17.440 Well, you provide every now and then some like historical context, give people some understanding what's going on, what they're about to read.

00:05:24.060 How did you piece together all this material?

00:05:26.980 Like where did you go for the material?

00:05:28.660 And then what was the process of creating the story?

00:05:31.920 Yeah.

00:05:32.480 So it's a mix of archival oral histories.

00:05:36.640 There are some incredible projects and archives that have pulled together first-person memories and oral histories of veterans at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, at the Imperial War Museum in London.

00:05:52.360 The American Veterans Project at the Library of Congress, as well as lots and lots of memoirs and letters from the battlefield, newspaper interviews, magazine pieces, you know, official reports, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:10.260 And I think I ended up amassing about 5,000 oral histories in pulling this together.

00:06:17.320 The first draft of this book, believe it or not, was about 1.2 million words.

00:06:23.820 That's 3,000 or 4,000 pages.

00:06:26.480 And then it was just a lot of whittling and carving and shaping to get it down to the story that's included here, which ultimately features about 700 voices.

00:06:40.940 I think the final number is 692 different participants.

00:06:45.380 Some names you know, FDR and Churchill and Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery and a lot of names that you don't.

00:06:54.320 You know, American families back home, British civilians, French civilians, allied troops, sailors, soldiers, Marines, Coast Guard, and a lot from a lot of the rest of the countries that were part of that war effort.

00:07:09.460 D-Day is as international a day of combat as we have probably ever experienced in history.

00:07:15.900 And, you know, it was that naval force off the shores of Normandy had more than a dozen nationalities represented, you know, including more than 600 Dutch sailors.

00:07:27.740 So let's get into D-Day.

00:07:28.860 First off, why is D-Day called D-Day?

00:07:30.860 I'm sure some people don't even know that.

00:07:32.940 Yeah.

00:07:33.380 What's funny about it is D-Day is just a generic military term for the start of any operation.

00:07:40.680 It's a planning term in that when you're doing a large, complex operation, the planning for it starts long before a specific day or month or even location has been chosen.

00:07:56.480 And so D-Day is a way to denote the start of an operation and, you know, D-Day plus one is the day after the invasion and D-Day minus one is the day before the invasion, so on and so forth, to give the planners the chance to build these incredibly complex logistical timelines.

00:08:14.700 But, you know, at a very technical level, there have been, you know, dozens or scores of D-Days.

00:08:21.540 You know, the first one was recorded in World War I.

00:08:24.460 There's actually a book that comes out in 1944 called D-Day written by the author John Gunther that's about the invasion of Italy.

00:08:33.880 Yet, you know, here we are 80 years later, if you walk up to anyone on the street and say D-Day, there is only one D-Day that we remember in history, and that's June 6th, 1944.

00:08:47.060 This is the most epic, most sweeping of all D-Days.

00:08:51.620 Not only that, I mean, it's arguably the most sweeping and epic human endeavor that we've ever seen before and might ever see again.

00:09:01.860 The scale of that invasion and the planning that went into it is just monumental in the sort of most monumental sense of that word.

00:09:13.360 Yeah, how many people were involved?

00:09:14.800 I mean, that was one of the biggest takeaways I got from this book.

00:09:17.840 It was a reminder of how big D-Day was.

00:09:22.500 When you think about D-Day, oh, you just think about the invasion itself, and you only see maybe the soldiers running up and saving Private Ryan,

00:09:29.940 or maybe you see the band of brothers doing their thing, but it was huge.

00:09:35.020 Like, give us an idea, like, how many people were involved, how many ships, planes, et cetera?

00:09:40.120 It was the largest sea armada ever assembled in human history.

00:09:45.700 Depending exactly on how you count it, it was around 5,000 ships involved on D-Day itself.

00:09:52.900 You know, more than a million combatants on the move on the Allied side on D-Day, about 160,000 troops in the first invasion wave coming ashore.

00:10:05.440 13,000 paratroopers carried aboard more than 2,000 planes.

00:10:10.700 And then the scale and scope of everything that was included in that, the jeeps and tanks and gallons of drinking water and numbers of meals ready to eat.

00:10:29.300 And, you know, the number of tanks and pints of blood and the whole sweep of that day is really incredible to calculate,

00:10:39.700 especially when you think about basically getting every single one of those items to the place that it is supposed to be down to the minute that it is supposed to arrive,

00:10:52.040 which was how closely calculated D-Day was, both in terms of loading people aboard ships, but then also the sense of what was arriving at the beach on D-Day itself.

00:11:05.300 Were there any quotes that you came across that really stood out to you that captured just how big D-Day was?

00:11:11.060 Well, I think one of the things that, and you sort of mentioned this a little bit already,

00:11:16.100 that there's really no way to grasp how big D-Day actually was because this personal experience of D-Day was often so small.

00:11:27.500 In the foreword to the book, there are sort of two quotes that stand out for me.

00:11:32.040 Andy Rooney, who went on, of course, to be the famous CBS News correspondent, he says,

00:11:36.940 no one can tell the whole story of D-Day because no one knows it.

00:11:41.040 And Ernest Hemingway, who was aboard one of the landing craft that day, although he didn't actually go ashore himself,

00:11:57.760 he writes, you could write for a week and not give everyone credit for what that person did on a front of 1,135 yards.

00:12:06.900 So I think that the dichotomy of that day is how much of that day was really lived at this incredible individual micro level,

00:12:20.100 even as the macro experience of that day was the most monumental in human history.

00:12:27.400 Yeah, I've had several World War II historians on the podcast before.

00:12:31.860 And I remember, I think I asked this question to Alex Kershaw a while back ago in one interview.

00:12:36.500 It was about D-Day, I believe.

00:12:39.140 And I asked him, like, how do you keep finding these stories?

00:12:41.620 You know, because he'll find these stories of just a single soldier.

00:12:44.340 And it's just this amazing, epic story of this one guy.

00:12:48.640 And he just said, you don't realize how big that thing was.

00:12:52.880 We'll never run out of stories to find.

00:12:55.540 Yeah, absolutely.

00:12:57.280 And, you know, Alex Kershaw, really, you know, one of the things that he helped excavate and tell in a new thread that I follow in this book, too,

00:13:07.360 is the incredible story of Company A and Company B of the 116th Infantry Regiment,

00:13:15.760 the 29th Division at Omaha Beach, who were the first wave at one end of that beach.

00:13:23.160 They were mostly from this single town in Bedford, Virginia.

00:13:28.880 And they were devastated and wiped out in the way that has, I think, come to symbolize Omaha Beach and the killing field of Omaha Beach for so many Americans.

00:13:42.160 Think about, you know, those first seven minutes of saving Private Ryan.

00:13:45.440 And Company A of the 116th storms ashore the first wave at Omaha Beach.

00:13:52.940 They leave the ship that morning with 230 members of their company.

00:13:59.460 And just 18 will make it to the end of June 6th unscathed.

00:14:06.620 And for my purposes, that was actually a very hard portion of the book to tell because there just weren't enough people who survived the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach in order to tell about it later.

00:14:22.060 And I struggled to pull together those couple of chapters at the start of the Omaha Beach section.

00:14:27.720 But when I talk about doing oral history, my goal in reading and assessing and looking at the first person stories of an event like 9-11 or an event like D-Day is you try to focus on what I call the ordinary and the extraordinary.

00:14:47.500 And what I mean by that is you want to sort of figure out what the ordinary experiences are.

00:14:54.580 You know, what is sort of the baseline experience that most people have on 9-11 or D-Day so that you can include those and capture what the basic experience of that day was like.

00:15:09.980 On 9-11, it's, you know, what's the ordinary experience of someone evacuating down the stairwells of the Twin Towers after the attack?

00:15:18.960 What's the ordinary experience of a firefighter responding to 9-11?

00:15:22.940 And then you want the extraordinary, you know, you want those incredible outlier stories that push people to the limit of human experience and capability.

00:15:38.840 And what just stands out so much about writing about D-Day is how extraordinary the ordinary actually was.

00:15:53.340 As you sort of imply in your question, you end up just reading, you know, one version after another, after another.

00:16:01.460 These people that you have never heard of who that day do things that would, you know, in any other circumstance stand as one of the most heroic things a human being could ever do.

00:16:17.180 And yet that day is not even the most interesting story on that stretch of 1,135 yards of beach.

00:16:27.220 So you break the book up into several sections.

00:16:31.560 First section is about the preparation for D-Day.

00:16:34.800 And this began an entire year before it actually happened in 1943.

00:16:39.080 And I really enjoyed this section because as I was reading that I was incredibly impressed with how thorough everyone was who was preparing this thing, how well thought out it was, the logistics of, you know, figuring out how to move so many people, how to make sure you have enough ships, how to coordinate everything.

00:16:59.220 I was thinking, I don't know if we could ever do something like that again, because everything, you know, you even go to a fast food restaurant and things just don't work, but they're somehow able to plan this great undertaking.

00:17:11.100 Who were the main planners that you highlight in this section?

00:17:15.700 Yeah, this actually to me was one of the more surprising efforts of writing and researching this book was I started this book expecting, you know, I'll have a couple of chapters about the lead up and the planning.

00:17:28.140 And then get right into D-Day itself.

00:17:32.500 Yet so much of the story of D-Day actually turns out to be the work that went into preparing for D-Day.

00:17:39.960 And in many ways, as terrible and high the cost was in human lives on D-Day itself, it was far lower than planners had anticipated or feared.

00:17:53.740 In part due to how good and thorough and specific and advanced the planning was in those months and years ahead of time.

00:18:03.220 And so about the first third of the book really ends up being both the planning and the training for D-Day itself.

00:18:12.000 And there's this wonderful figure, Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, British general, who ends up the head of the operation to plan for D-Day.

00:18:23.920 It's this organization that ends up being called Cossack, the chief of staff to the supreme allied commander, an organization that actually exists for almost a year before they get around to naming a supreme allied commander himself, which of course is Dwight Eisenhower.

00:18:42.360 And that Morgan is out there for months planning with this incredibly small staff that with time then grows into this giant machine building in invasion force and invasion plan more complex and larger than anything humans have ever attempted before.

00:19:08.780 Is there a part of the planning phase that is sort of archetypical of just how complex preparing for the operation was?

00:19:17.120 Well, what I think is sort of funny about it is like you realize sort of how much of the planning ends up taking place in these video game terms you would call side quests.

00:19:27.800 The sheer scale of projects that make up the individual components of D-Day.

00:19:38.040 One of the challenges that the allied planners are wrestling with is how to bring ashore after the invasion all of the supplies and follow on reinforcements that they're going to need to bring.

00:19:51.300 One of the most basic parts of an invasion is, you know, you need to have ports and harbors to bring the follow on supplies by, but where the allies choose to invade doesn't have any natural harbors and ports.

00:20:08.100 And so they end up building these things called mulberries, which are basically portable concrete harbors that they're going to float across the channel with tugboats and tow and then sink off the Normandy coast to basically bring their own harbor with them.

00:20:31.580 Again, this is just, you know, the equivalent of like one of the many side quests that people are working on leading up to D-Day.

00:20:38.580 And those mulberries end up being 2 million tons of steel and concrete, more than 200 caissons constructed by tens of thousands of workers across the British Isles.

00:20:54.580 It's some of them as big as five story buildings.

00:20:57.960 And then they also bring 70 old Navy ships that they are going to sink off the coast of these harbors to build artificial breakwaters.

00:21:10.520 And this one operation alone is so big that it requires every tugboat in the British Isles and as well as a whole bunch brought over from the United States itself, just for this one tiny piece of this giant operation.

00:21:29.740 Yeah.

00:21:30.640 Brigadier Walter, he said this about the mulberries.

00:21:33.420 It was probably the greatest wartime engineering feat of all time, of all time, of all time.

00:21:38.740 And then Winston Churchill talked about it.

00:21:41.080 He says the whole project, talking about the mulberries, was majestic.

00:21:44.480 Churchill calls D-Day, the whole preparation, majestic.

00:21:47.340 He likes to use that word a lot.

00:21:49.100 He does.

00:21:49.920 And he really gets, you can sort of see, you know, he's a Navy guy himself.

00:21:55.060 He's led Britain through this incredibly dark period that I try to tell in the first chapter of the book as World War II opens and begins.

00:22:07.180 And the British and allied forces are thrown out of Europe at Dunkirk.

00:22:11.780 You see how excited he gets by the planning of Operation Overlord, a codename he actually selects and improves himself.

00:22:20.540 Yeah, that was interesting.

00:22:21.340 You talk about, there's a quote from someone saying how he took a very personal interest in codenames.

00:22:26.780 Yes, he evidently like loves codenames and ends up, you know, talking about them at great length and choosing them and changing them to sort of reflect his own beliefs in these operations.

00:22:39.560 But one of my sort of favorite scenes or anecdotes in the book is right up at the end of the run-up to the invasion as they're getting ready.

00:22:50.040 He asks, Winston Churchill asks for permission to accompany the landing aboard one of the British Navy vessels.

00:22:59.800 And Eisenhower basically says, you know, Winston, I don't think that's a very good idea.

00:23:03.640 Then Churchill is like, well, if I just didn't list as a Navy aide aboard one of the ships, like you can't do anything about it.

00:23:13.320 And so he makes this plan to accompany the landing as just sort of a run-of-the-mill Navy aide aboard one of the British warships.

00:23:22.220 And, you know, Eisenhower is pulling his hair out over this because he doesn't want to risk the prime minister in first wave of the D-Day landing.

00:23:31.780 And then the King of England actually gets wind of this, recognizes that it's a problem, and comes up with sort of the only solution that he can think of to get Winston to back down, which is he's like, well, if Winston Churchill's going, I'll go too.

00:23:49.740 And, you know, tries to insist, not entirely seriously, it seems, that he will accompany the landing invasion force as well.

00:23:59.460 At which point Churchill is like, well, we can't risk the King, so I won't go so the King won't go.

00:24:06.480 And, you know, Eisenhower sort of ends up getting a good laugh over the whole thing and how astutely the King maneuvered Winston Churchill out of the invasion force.

00:24:16.460 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:24:24.520 And now back to the show.

00:24:26.440 And what's crazy, too, about the planning part and getting ready for D-Day, they kept this thing secret.

00:24:32.500 The Germans had an idea that something was happening, but they didn't know exactly what was going to happen or when it was going to happen.

00:24:39.220 I was impressed by that.

00:24:40.420 And the other thing I learned, too, from your book, and I didn't realize this, is how much training went on for D-Day.

00:24:48.200 Because you don't really, when you watch the movies about World War II, you'll see the crew, like, you know, a company at their boot camp in the United States.

00:24:57.180 But you don't see them training for the operations that they took part in.

00:25:01.880 What was the training like in preparation for D-Day?

00:25:04.340 Yeah, this, again, was part of what was so fascinating to me, was understanding that actually more Allied troops were killed in the training for D-Day than on D-Day itself.

00:25:17.440 That the Allies spend really the better part of a year ahead of D-Day running mock invasions of the British countryside.

00:25:29.900 That they actually evacuate an entire seaside British county of civilians in order to set up a training facility that looks like the beaches that the troops will storm in Normandy.

00:25:45.040 Yeah, that was really interesting, because you get firsthand accounts of the residents there.

00:25:49.520 And, you know, they just basically get this announcement saying, yeah, you got to leave.

00:25:53.160 You got to sell your stuff and get out of here.

00:25:55.100 Yeah.

00:25:55.260 And it's not even for an invasion, it's just so we can train.

00:25:58.280 Just to practice for the invasion.

00:25:59.920 And that for months, the U.S. and British and Allied troops load up in landing craft and go out into the English Channel and then turn around and storm back ashore in the British countryside as they train for this.

00:26:15.480 And that there's one particular exercise in the spring of 44 that's called Exercise Tiger that was supposed to be the last large scale rehearsal for the troops heading to Utah Beach.

00:26:28.840 And, you know, it is it is all of the force that is heading to Utah Beach, you know, arrayed out on ships in the English Channel.

00:26:36.080 And the night before the dawn invasion preparation, some German torpedo boats get through the security screen and sink a couple of landing craft and end up killing in that one night upwards of 700 Allied servicemen, mostly Americans.

00:26:57.720 And we actually don't know the final number.

00:27:00.860 It could be much higher than that, even the Pentagon covers that up for decades.

00:27:05.500 It's not until really the 1980s that they admit that this incident happened at all, let alone that those units headed to Utah Beach suffered orders of multiple more casualties in Exercise Tiger than they did actually storming ashore at Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944.

00:27:24.760 You have some quotes from some soldiers who were part of that and how they had to keep it quiet.

00:27:30.020 A story that stood out for me was from Corporal Eugene Carney.

00:27:34.240 He says, we were told to keep our mouth shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined.

00:27:38.920 When we went through the mess line, we weren't even allowed to talk to the cooks.

00:27:42.780 If, for example, we wanted two potatoes, we were told to hold up two fingers.

00:27:47.040 If three, three fingers.

00:27:48.860 We could have all we wanted, but could say nothing.

00:27:51.100 And then another sad one, this is from Private Veldon Downing.

00:27:56.020 He said, they told us to keep our mouth shut and we did.

00:27:58.860 After the war, the parents of one of the kids I served with, who'd been lost, drove all the way out here from New York just to ask me what happened.

00:28:05.580 I told them I couldn't talk about it.

00:28:07.300 Yeah, and it was, you know, it was this incredible secret for years and years and years, secret in that moment, both because of the concerns about what it would do to undermine public confidence in the invasion, but also what it would do to the morale of the servicemen heading to the invasion itself in a couple of weeks.

00:28:30.980 And one of the things that is really incredible to realize coming out of Exercise Tiger is the thing that had dogged Eisenhower and Morgan and all of the planners through that entire spring had been there just weren't enough landing craft.

00:28:47.480 There just weren't enough landing ships and they'd end up delaying the whole operation from May until June in order to get literally one more month's worth of landing craft production in the United States over to Europe.

00:29:03.800 And then in Exercise Tiger, they lose a couple more landing craft and that is the last reserve that the entire allied military has of landing craft.

00:29:19.740 And they are down to the point where had they lost one or two more landing craft, it's possible that they would have ended up having to scale back the D-Day invasion.

00:29:30.340 And not only were soldiers getting very specific training, you talk about how the bombers were also getting trained.

00:29:37.660 There was a ton of reconnaissance done in preparation for D-Day and they had film.

00:29:42.520 And so these bomber crews, they were watching this film over and over again of what their flight into Normandy would look like.

00:29:48.560 And they knew exactly where the pillboxes were, where they needed to drop their bombs. 0.87

00:29:52.920 So they knew exactly where they needed to go.

00:29:54.740 And I mean, that's something that also impressed me was the level of reconnaissance that happened during this planning process.

00:30:01.200 Yeah, down to the point where they had such thorough reconnaissance that, you know, if you were the coxswain of a landing craft, you got a photo of what your tiny stretch of beach should look like.

00:30:17.060 You know, 1,000 yards off the beach when you are coming into shore.

00:30:22.520 You know, it was like incredibly detailed and advanced reconnaissance given the comparatively primitive photographic capabilities and technologies of that era.

00:30:34.100 So, okay, at this point, we're a couple months away.

00:30:38.080 We're in the spring of 44.

00:30:39.440 They still hadn't decided the exact date.

00:30:41.960 They knew it was going to be late May, June, based on, you know, where the moon was going to be, tides, things like that.

00:30:48.480 But they couldn't pinpoint the exact date because they need to look at the weather.

00:30:52.400 And we'll talk about the weather here in a bit.

00:30:54.060 So you had, I think it was like 2 million people in England training, just getting ready for this invasion, not knowing when it was going to happen.

00:31:02.500 And so morale becomes an issue.

00:31:03.720 This always becomes an issue in the military when you have a bunch of guys not doing anything, kind of milling about.

00:31:10.380 And so you talk about, you know, what Montgomery did, what Eisenhower did to boost morale.

00:31:15.340 But you also recount this really harrowing story that just made me, like, I felt sad after I read it, of this chaplain who basically went to go give a pump-up speech to the guys.

00:31:26.800 And it was basically the biggest downer.

00:31:28.120 He was just like, yeah, it's going to be tough.

00:31:31.000 A lot of people are going to die.

00:31:32.060 And then everyone was just feeling down and despondent.

00:31:34.980 So this other guy had to come in and give a better speech.

00:31:38.620 And the correspondent from Reuters talked about it because he saw this chaplain give this really Debbie Downer speech.

00:31:45.040 He says, I went to the mess for lunch, feeling very uncomfortable.

00:31:47.620 As I was walking back to the tent, I was a few paces away when I heard a rifle crack.

00:31:52.940 I saw the canvas move, went in, and there was the padre, talking about the chaplain.

00:31:57.140 He'd shot himself.

00:31:57.940 Yeah, it was one of the British units, one of the commando units, sort of got this terrible, as you said, Debbie Downer speech from this padre.

00:32:06.000 And Lord Lovat, who's the very colorful commander of the British commandos, ends up basically, like, pushing the guy off stage and jumping up to, you know, recharge up his men, worried that they're going to have this crisis of confidence in themselves in those final hours.

00:32:22.860 And he ends up basically saying to the padre, you know, hey, you're off the invasion.

00:32:30.280 You know, you can't come with us anymore.

00:32:32.180 And the chaplain goes back to his tent and kills himself.

00:32:36.720 And he's so despondent about the damage that he's caused to, the potential damage that he's caused to the invasion, they end up listing him formally as a battle casualty, you know, even though he dies in camp before they leave.

00:32:51.100 Okay, so you have a section about the weather forecast.

00:32:55.020 That played a big role.

00:32:56.560 Originally, I think D-Day was supposed to be the 5th of June.

00:33:00.380 Exactly.

00:33:01.000 Yeah.

00:33:01.360 And the weather was bad.

00:33:02.620 And then Eisenhower, you just talk about the tension and the stress that Eisenhower had to go through to make this decision because it was on him.

00:33:09.200 Like, he was the only one who could make this decision.

00:33:12.320 And you can tell that the burden was just so intense on him.

00:33:16.160 But then he makes the go.

00:33:18.200 And when he made that decision, everyone, he says, everyone kind of lighted up.

00:33:21.460 He says this, Dwight Eisenhower, there was a definite brightening of faces as without further word.

00:33:26.600 Each went off to his respective post of duty to flash out to his command the messages that would set the whole host in motion.

00:33:33.080 And then Churchill said the die was irrevocably cast.

00:33:36.000 The invasion would be launched June 6th.

00:33:37.880 So, it started early in the morning, like right after midnight, with the paratroopers going in behind enemy lines.

00:33:45.480 What was their mission, those initial paratroopers?

00:33:48.800 Yeah.

00:33:49.180 The weather forecast turns this whole thing and almost upends the entire invasion.

00:33:55.980 There are only three days in the start of June when the tides, the moon, all of the weather conditions that they need overlap.

00:34:04.980 And if they don't go then, they will need to delay at least two weeks, if not a month.

00:34:11.860 The challenge is, when you have an operation as big as D-Day, everyone is on board the ships.

00:34:19.340 And entire convoys have already put to sea even before they're sure when exactly the D-Day invasion will be launched.

00:34:28.600 And so, Eisenhower is sitting there on June 3rd, June 4th, looking at these weather reports, knowing that D-Day is already in motion.

00:34:39.500 There are a million people loading aboard the ships even that weekend.

00:34:44.260 And if they can't go on June 6th, they're actually going to need to offload all of those million people and, you know, put them back into camps across England. 0.85

00:34:59.140 And the security risk of that, these million people all now know their mission.

00:35:03.920 They know where the invasion is going to take place.

00:35:06.160 And so, for Eisenhower, it's this incredibly high-stakes, almost existential question about the Allied cause and whether the invasion can take place as he's weighing the weather reports.

00:35:20.480 And then the weather just clears just a tiny, tiny bit enough to let them launch the invasion.

00:35:27.860 And it begins, as you said, that night with the paratroopers, the American paratroopers who are dropped behind the far western flank of Utah Beach, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 13,000 of those paratroopers dropping into the western flank and the approaches behind Utah Beach to make sure that the troops can actually get off Utah Beach once they get there.

00:35:55.800 And then the British 6th Airborne is dropped along the eastern flank behind what we now call Sword Beach to secure the beach exits there and to seize the river crossings that would stop the German reinforcements from racing up behind the British and Canadian beaches.

00:36:17.820 Again, these extraordinary stories that on any other day would be some of the wildest versions of military heroism recorded.

00:36:30.700 In the 6th Airborne, they drop three gliders of troops into this tiny field next to this one key bridge that's later now sort of known to history as Pegasus Bridge.

00:36:45.620 They drop in to this tiny field.

00:36:49.700 I've stood there and you look at where these three gliders have all crashed just a couple of yards apart, you know, and it's impossible to imagine doing this in the dark, landing as close to the bridge as they did.

00:37:01.520 And they storm out and seize Pegasus Bridge before the Germans have a chance to counterattack or destroy the bridge.

00:37:10.280 And then basically sort of set up to wait there till midday or early afternoon on the 6th when reinforcements will finally reach them from Sword Beach.

00:37:20.960 So you have a section about the naval part of this.

00:37:24.300 They codenamed that Neptune.

00:37:26.180 This is the naval component of D-Day.

00:37:28.000 And again, epic, majestic.

00:37:30.780 And you have some great quotes from the Germans who were, you know, on the shores of Normandy and looking out into the ocean and just seeing just that giant armada.

00:37:41.880 You have this one quote from a guy named Carl Wegener.

00:37:44.980 This really stood out to me.

00:37:46.040 He said, violently, my arm was shaken by Willie.

00:37:48.660 I sat straight up and looked at him.

00:37:51.000 His face was pale.

00:37:52.360 I asked him what was wrong.

00:37:54.240 He just pointed toward the sea.

00:37:55.900 I looked out and saw ships as far as one could see.

00:37:59.000 I'm not ashamed to say that I was never so scared of my life, but the sight was so impressive that no one could help but stare in amazement.

00:38:06.260 Yeah.

00:38:06.460 I mean, it was just like, I mean, I couldn't imagine.

00:38:08.120 Again, like we look in the past, like we know what happened.

00:38:10.080 Can you imagine if you're some young 19-year-old German kid and you look out into the sea and it's just thousands and thousands of these black dots that you know they're going to start pounding you with artillery? 0.97

00:38:22.200 Yeah, and it's also, I think from the German perspective, you get a sense of the confusion and chaos that reigns that day.

00:38:33.460 Again, I think it's normally lost in the way that we tell a narrative history, but that comes through so clearly in an oral history.

00:38:41.400 Where, you know, even something as simple as like we know and we talk about it as history is these five beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juneau, and Sword.

00:38:51.660 I talk about the British Airborne dropping in to secure the eastern flank and the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropping in to secure the western flank.

00:38:59.460 The Germans are waking up that morning. 0.99

00:39:02.480 They don't understand any of this.

00:39:04.040 They don't understand that there are five beaches.

00:39:06.040 They don't understand that it's British troops on, you know, one side and American paratroopers on the other.

00:39:13.300 They're trying to figure out even whether this is the real invasion because the Allies have done this incredible job basically misdirecting that the real invasion, quote unquote, is going to come in mid-July in Calais, which is the place where the Germans sort of most expect the invasion.

00:39:34.620 It's the shortest part across the English Channel.

00:39:37.720 It seems like it would be the easiest place to launch an invasion.

00:39:42.360 And instead, they launch this invasion across the English Channel, you know, where it's 100 miles wide.

00:39:49.080 It is just this utter and complete shock to the Germans who spend the entire day trying to understand what they're actually working on. 1.00

00:39:59.260 The most harrowing part of D-Day and the one that's been captured in film by, you know, Saving Private Ryan was soldiers leaving landing craft in the ocean and charging the beaches of Normandy.

00:40:10.240 Were there any firsthand accounts that stood out to you that really captured the carnage and chaos of that amphibious invasion?

00:40:16.220 Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about the unit known as the Bedford Boys, you know, that 116th Infantry, Company A, Company B, storming ashore at Omaha Beach.

00:40:26.380 But I think one of the things that I really tried to reframe a little bit in this telling of the book is I think we have this mythology in D-Day that Omaha Beach was this incredible killing ground and everything else was a cakewalk, especially the British and Canadian beaches.

00:40:46.800 That is sort of technically true in a limited sense if you are talking about people who die on the sand itself.

00:40:58.660 But it's not really reflective of the totality of the experience of D-Day, which is when you add in the casualties of the paratroopers and the fighting of the paratroopers behind Utah Beach, that sector is secured at great cost.

00:41:19.340 You know, when you talk about the British and Canadian beaches, there are individual units where they are absolutely devastated in their early waves of the invasion.

00:41:32.960 A hundred and ten of the Queen's own rifles fall as they march up the beaches in the British sector.

00:41:41.340 And then the British and Canadian units get off the beach relatively quickly and then are engaged in very heavy fighting in sort of an urban environment inland on D-Day itself.

00:41:54.740 And that for the British and that for the British and Canadian forces, in some ways, the afternoon of D-Day is where they see their most violent combat, even as sort of the Americans, once they get through their beach defenses at Utah and Omaha, sort of their fighting is mostly done.

00:42:15.500 There's a really sad story at Juneau.

00:42:17.760 So this is the Canadian part of the invasion, and it's the story of Corporal Fred Barnard.

00:42:23.980 Could you read that one?

00:42:25.640 I thought it was really poignant.

00:42:27.940 Yeah.

00:42:28.540 This is Corporal Fred Barnard, Company B, Queen's own rifles, 8th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Canadian Division.

00:42:35.740 My brother Don was on the boat with me.

00:42:38.780 You could claim your brother to your regiment, get them to transfer him to your regiment.

00:42:43.760 And I claimed him in 1944. 0.68

00:42:46.720 And as we were going down the ramp, I yelled to my brother, Don, give him hell.

00:42:51.280 And the next thing I know, I'm in the water maybe four feet deep.

00:42:56.100 When I went up the beach, I passed one of the guys in my platoon, just a kid, about 19.

00:43:01.660 He had been ripped right down, crying for his mother.

00:43:05.460 The next thing I know, there was Don lying on his back, a bullet right there in the heart.

00:43:11.880 There was just a black hole in his uniform right in the middle of his chest.

00:43:16.460 No blood.

00:43:17.140 It was as if he was asleep.

00:43:21.020 I'm not surprised, I guess, that that quote stood out to you.

00:43:24.260 But that really stuck with me when I was reading that.

00:43:27.520 I'm grateful there was a Canadian journalist named Ted Barris who went out and did the one definitive book on Juno and gathered up a lot of those memories and interviewed a lot of those veterans when they were still around.

00:43:39.820 And Ted very nicely shared his research and interviewed transcripts with me for this book.

00:43:44.820 And I thought about that moment so much.

00:43:48.340 Like, what must it have been like to go through the rest of your life knowing that you had done this thing that you sort of thought was great?

00:43:56.760 Like, you had gotten your brother to serve in the same unit as you did and gotten him into the same landing craft that you did on D-Day and then for him to die.

00:44:08.620 I don't know what Fred Barnard ever felt about that.

00:44:13.700 But you could just imagine the guilt or the second guessing or the responsibility that you would feel for a moment like that.

00:44:25.300 Yeah.

00:44:25.440 And it also just shows, like, how random stuff was.

00:44:27.540 There's so many accounts where, you know, a guy would say, like, I just ducked and the bullet whizzed by and hit the guy behind me.

00:44:35.540 And these guys, you could tell they just felt so helpless in a lot of cases.

00:44:40.680 Of course, there were moments of gallantry and bravery, you know, the Dick Winters types who went up and charged and did all that amazing stuff.

00:44:47.660 But I just couldn't imagine what it would have been like.

00:44:49.900 One minute you're talking to your buddy and the next minute his head's blown off and you have to keep going.

00:44:56.580 You see in so many of the stories that day the randomness of luck and chance.

00:45:03.420 And the, as you said, that some of D-Day was skill and some of it was courage and bravery and heroism.

00:45:14.280 And a lot of it was just random fate and dumb luck and chance of who was on what patch of sand or, you know, in which hedgerow at which moment when a shell landed or a bullet went by.

00:45:32.160 And there were so many people that day who, you know, again, went through these extraordinary moments that were entirely ordinary for everyone around them.

00:45:43.800 One of the goals you had with this book was to, I think, address this myth that is, I think, built up around D-Day, that it was this really tenuous thing that was always teetering on the edge of failure.

00:45:56.980 But in the narrative that you were able to pull out of these accounts, you see that, yes, there were a lot of casualties.

00:46:03.920 A lot of men lost their lives that day.

00:46:06.520 But overall, it was really a smashing success.

00:46:10.200 It was probably one of the biggest military successes in world history.

00:46:13.040 Absolutely, and I think that is, to me, one of the things that really stands out is we have this sense that this was this incredible gamble.

00:46:22.760 And at one level it is, but the truth of the matter is every allied amphibious invasion in World War II succeeds.

00:46:32.600 And the reason for that is precisely because of what a gamble and amphibious invasion actually is.

00:46:40.720 And so for Operation Overlord, the Americans have invested so much.

00:46:47.060 They have developed so many new technologies.

00:46:49.480 They have developed so many new capabilities.

00:46:52.980 They have trained so hard for so long.

00:46:56.920 They've brought such scale and scope and size to this invasion that the Germans just don't really have much of a chance on D-Day. 0.81

00:47:05.200 Anywhere the allies choose to land on D-Day, they are going to punch through.

00:47:12.460 The question is, can they stay ashore once they're there?

00:47:17.720 And can they get to, you know, can they get enough follow-on supplies and reinforcements ashore faster than the Germans can get reinforcements up from sort of inland in France and Germany?

00:47:33.760 And the sort of tenuousness of the invasion actually is not D-Day itself.

00:47:42.020 It's the days after June 7th, June 10th, June 14th.

00:47:46.760 And that when we talk about D-Day, D-Day is really just the start.

00:47:54.400 It takes the Allies 77 days to complete the Normandy campaign and break out of the beachheads that they have built up and, you know, begin the march for Paris and Germany.

00:48:11.300 And that D-Day feels like, in so many ways, like the triumph. 0.92

00:48:18.060 You know, it is the day we storm ashore and pierce fortress Europe.

00:48:21.960 But for all of the troops who made it ashore that day and lived, you know, some of their most poignant reflections are waking up the morning of June 7th and starting to fight all over again.

00:48:34.640 Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why D-Day, I mean, yes, it was a pivotal moment in, as you say, pivotal moment in human history.

00:48:43.220 But it was a moment where there was so much carnage.

00:48:46.640 But also you see bravery, you see courage, you see compassion of these soldiers trying to help each other out.

00:48:54.920 And I'd like to end with this, this quote from Andy Rooney, if you don't mind.

00:48:59.520 It's in the foreword.

00:49:01.020 Can you read that?

00:49:01.720 Andy Rooney, if you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colville-sur-Mare overlooking Omaha Beach and see what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

00:49:22.420 Well, Garrett, this has been a great conversation.

00:49:24.440 Where can people go to learn more about the book?

00:49:26.500 So you can get the book anywhere that you like purchasing books.

00:49:31.860 The book is called When the Sea Came Alive.

00:49:34.380 If you are a podcast listener, I would encourage you to pick up the audiobook, which is an incredible marvel and masterpiece itself.

00:49:45.220 It's been read by dozens of actors.

00:49:48.420 So every voice is different in the audiobook, and you get the full sense of the accents of the British and Canadian and French and Germans who fought that day.

00:50:00.460 Well, Garrett Graff, thanks for your time.

00:50:01.680 It's been a pleasure.

00:50:02.740 Thanks so much for having me.

00:50:03.840 My guest here is Garrett Graff.

00:50:06.300 He's the author of the book, When the Sea Came Alive, An Oral History of D-Day.

00:50:09.540 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:50:12.060 You can find more information about his work at his website, garrettgraff.com.

00:50:15.720 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Normandy, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:50:20.860 Thank you.

00:50:50.860 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:50:53.860 Until next time, I'm Brett McKay.

00:50:55.300 Remind you to not listen to the MN Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - June 05, 2024

Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later

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